I Think Too Much

I just snuck out of the office for a few minutes and went downstairs to Kneaders, a local chain of cafe/bakeries that pours a decent cup of joe. We do have good, fresh coffee available in copious amounts here on the 13th Floor — of course we do, we’re an ad agency; this place would grind to a shuddering, miserable halt without a steady supply of java — but sometimes a change of scenery and a little variation in flavor can be just as stimulating as the dose of caffeine itself, you know? I usually pop down there once a week or so, or sometimes if I’m feeling a little more ambitious, I’ll hike a little farther to Starbucks or Beans and Brews or even the Roasting Company. But today it was just straight down to the food court my new office building looms above, and into Kneaders.

For a simple coffee (as opposed to an espresso or one of the froofy-type coffee drinks), the process at Kneaders is pretty much self-serve. I bought my paper cup at the counter, then walked over to the soda fountain/condiment area and poured my own from the big pump pots there. Since I was indulging in “outside coffee,” I went ahead and added a generous splash of half-and-half, and a couple packets of Splenda, and then… I couldn’t find anything to stir the mixture. None of those little red things that resemble miniature straws, no wooden swizzle sticks. The only tools available seemed to be the plastic flatware offered for people who buy food there. So I pulled out a knife, circled it through my coffee a couple times, and was just lifting my hand to chuck the used knife down the garbage hole when something occurred to me.

About 140 million years ago, some dinosaur dropped dead in a swamp somewhere and decomposed into organic sludge, which then sat unmolested in a rock stratum for eons until some enterprising little bipedal mammals sucked it out of the ground and rendered it into this knife, which I then used for exactly three twists of my wrist before preparing to discard it forever. And suddenly the weight of all that time and energy and effort collapsed down around me like the gallons of hot molten marshmallow that enveloped the dickish EPA guy at the end of Ghostbusters, and I… I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t throw away that unremarkable sliver of black plastic, not after the thought that all that potential added up to such a pathetically brief action.

So I kept it. And I brought it back up the elevator with me. And now it’s sitting on the side of my desk, silently mocking me and my oftentimes ridiculously overdeveloped sense of responsibility for, well, everything…

Dec182012

Meanwhile, Out in the Driveway…

I’m sure this is what many of my Loyal Readers imagine whenever I mention that it’s snowing at the Bennion Compound:

I ought to talk to my friends in the 501st about getting one of those outfits, just to see what my redneck neighbors would do…

Image source.

Dec152012

Dumbasses

I love it when you special order an item from your local retailer — because you’re cool about supporting your community that way — and you arrange with the guy to call your cellphone when this item comes in, rather than the home phone number that’s listed in your account, because the item is supposed to be a gift for your cohabiting significant other and you don’t want to blow the Christmas-morning surprise. And then what happens? You find a message on the house phone this morning telling you that your item has arrived and can be picked up anytime, and oh, by the way, just in case you don’t remember what you ordered only a few days ago, let me tell you exactly what it is. In this message that may be heard by the cohabiting significant other for whom the item is supposed to be a gift. Rather than the private message to your cell, as we agreed upon.

Good thing I got to the house phone first this morning, isn’t it?

Dec132012

“Around the Corner”

If you haven’t been reading a web comic/blog called Zen Pencils, you really ought to check it out. I discovered it this past summer — you may recall that I reposted one of its cartoons back in July, if you can really apply such a pedestrian term as “cartoon” to these wonderful works of art — and since then it seems like it’s only gotten better and better. The artist is a chap named Gavin Aung Than, and what he does is take a quotation or a poem or some portion of a great speech, and then he illustrates it. The results are usually charming, occasionally brilliant, and often deeply moving. Here’s one that brought me to tears: I’ve never before encountered this poem, never heard of Charles Hanson Towne, but the lines about life being “a swift and terrible race” and “now we are busy, tired men” resonate terribly with my own preoccupations and resentments. Add in Than’s simple, evocative, and beautiful art… well, I thought this piece was one of the truest and most heartbreaking things I’ve ever run across. I’d seriously consider buying a print of this if (a) I didn’t already have scads of artwork needing to be framed and hung up, and (b) I thought I could look at this every day without feeling cold fingers flicker across my heart… absolutely devastating.

Original source here.

Dec092012

It’s the Little Things I Miss…

I’ve noticed a lot of changes with my body since my various ailments were diagnosed back in February. The most apparent is the fairly dramatic weight loss I’ve mentioned before. Yesterday, as the first real snow of the year started coming down outside, I dug out my box of sweaters and sweatshirts to see if I could still get away with wearing any of them, already knowing that the majority would be getting dropped on the donate-to-charity pile. Items that fit perfectly only last winter — or were even a little snug in some cases — now hang off my shoulders and billow around my torso to a degree that I can hardly comprehend. One pullover, in particular, made me look like a 10-year-old playing dress-up with daddy’s clothes. Or like a flying squirrel, if I raised my arms.

I’ve had that experience a lot over the past few months. On the one hand, this change is very gratifying. As near as I can figure, I now weigh about what I did when I graduated from college two decades ago, and who can complain about that? I’ve even discovered that a few very old garments I’ve held onto over the years as mementos fit me again. For example, I found a sweater vest that I must’ve bought around 1985 of thereabouts; the tag indicates it came from Jeans West, if anyone remembers that very ’80s mall clothier (your number-one source for parachute pants). I never thought I’d ever get back into this one… but it turned out to fit so well now I’m thinking about starting to use it again!

As much fun as that sort of thing is, though, it’s also weirdly disconcerting. I almost feel as if I’ve switched bodies with someone else. Could I really have once been so large that those giveaway clothes fit me? If clothes I’ve worn for so very long don’t fit me anymore, am I still really me? And if I’m not, who am I? I certainly haven’t regressed back into the me I was in 1985, just because I can wear that Jeans West sweater vest again. For one thing, that guy from ’85 could live on Ding Dongs, 7-Eleven nachos, and red-cream soda; if 2012 me tried that, his blood glucose would explode and he’d probably land in a diabetic coma. Drat the luck. I miss shitty 7-Eleven nachos.

Other things are different now, too. I don’t get headaches very often anymore, and when I do, they’re not nearly as intense as they used to be. I no longer suffer from heartburn, either, whereas I used to eat Tums by the fistful. And — this may be too much information, but what the hell — I’m not as gassy as I used to be either.

All of this is unquestionably for the better, even the weight loss, as weird and disturbing as it sometimes is to be physically larger in my mind than in reality. But there is one thing that’s different now that I sort of regret, and that’s my newly lower body temperature.

You see, for years I “ran hot,” for lack of a better description. The Girlfriend was convinced that I actually had a slightly higher body temperature than average, and affectionately referred to me as “her own personal space heater.” People didn’t believe her when she talked about how warm I was, so she’d have me demonstrate by pressing my palm to the other person’s exposed skin. This almost always resulted in a goggle-eyed stare of fascination as the sensation gradually settled in, like what happens when you sit in a patch of springtime sunlight pouring through a window. I used to think of these hot hands of mine as a kind of superpower, something I visualized very much like the image you see above. (That’s from an episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, if you don’t recognize it.) I delighted in my ability to warm others on frigid winter days simply by taking hold of their hands. I was proud of this weird little quirk of my physiology. I certainly never thought it was a sign that something might be wrong with me.

In retrospect, I suspect it was probably a symptom of my (then) outrageously high blood pressure. And now that I’m on medication and my BP is down here on Earth where it’s supposed to be instead of halfway to the International Space Station, my superpower has vanished. No more hot hands. And to make matters even more unhappy, I’m far more sensitive to the cold than I can remember ever being in my life. I’ve found myself wearing cardigans and fleece jackets in settings where everyone else is in short sleeves, and Anne and I are finding it difficult to get the thermostat in the house adjusted to something we can both live with. I always used to find it odd that my grandmother was constantly complaining of the cold, even in the middle of summer. Now I think I know what she may have been going through. And while I look and feel better than I have in years, this damn temperature issue also has me feeling old… as if I needed any more reason to fret about that. I fear becoming a stereotypical geezer shuffling around in a sweater. I feel like I’ve genuinely lost something unique and integral to my identity. I’ll get over the clothes, but the warmth was literally part of me, and I miss it. Wish I could it back somehow without risking my health to do it…

Dec072012

Quick Take: Moon

I’m a few years behind in seeing Moon, the 2009 indie science-fiction film directed by Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie!), but wow, what a great little movie. Sam Rockwell, perhaps best known for Galaxy Quest and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, turns in a bravura performance (or is that two performances?) in a virtual one-man show about the lone occupant of a lunar mining base who’s beginning to question his sanity as the end of his three-year tour approaches. It’s essentially a character study wrapped up in a mystery story that brilliantly expands on some of the ideas explored in my beloved Blade Runner — specifically questions of identity and whether we can trust our own memories, and what a person might go through emotionally when those things turn out to be… unreliable. I feared for a time that this was going to turn into one of those “mindf**k” stories that I have so little patience for, but in the end all is explained and logical and satisfactory. It’s a moving, very human story with plausible sci-fi underpinnings. And honestly, I think Moon looks every bit as good as this year’s Prometheus in terms of production design and FX, and it was done on a fraction of the budget using old-school miniatures instead of CGI.

Highly — and I do mean highly — recommended.

Dec062012

An Interesting Coincidence

This morning before work, I was reading a year-old Vanity Fair article about the discovery of a cache of Ernest Hemingway’s never-before-published correspondence in his old house in Cuba, which the Cuban government has maintained all these decades since his death as a virtual time capsule/shrine/museum. An interesting story, to be sure, but there was one odd little detail mentioned in passing about Papa’s house that caught my eye:

The connecting bathroom had a doctor’s scale, and on one of the walls, Hemingway had recorded his weight daily. It ranged from 242 pounds on February 21, 1955, to 190 1/2 pounds five years later.

As it happens, those numbers are almost identical to my own weight readings over the past year. That’s neither here nor there, of course, but considering the way I used to identify with Hemingway in my younger days — aside from his final bit with the shotgun, and the fact that he actually wrote fiction instead of just talking about it, the way I do — well, it struck me as an interesting coincidence…

Dec032012

J.J. Abrams Isn’t Winning Me Over

If my Loyal Readers will recall, I didn’t hate J.J. Abrams’ 2009 reboot of the Star Trek franchise, but I wasn’t especially wild about it either. I thought it was a superficially exhilarating popcorn flick, but really pretty dumb at its core. Also, for all the ballyhoo about the way Trek 2.0 (as I like to shorthand it) created an alternate Star Trek timeline in order to free the filmmakers from the accumulated continuity of five TV series and 10 previous feature films, its plot about a vengeance-seeking madman with a doomsday weapon struck me as, well, let’s call it overly familiar. And we won’t even speak of those damn lens-flares.

Now the marketing machine is cranking up again for the first of who knows how many Trek 2.0 sequels to come, Star Trek into Darkness. (Yes, I typed that correctly. If you haven’t been keeping up with this stuff, Abrams, et. al., has dropped the franchise’s long-established naming convention, i.e., Star Trek-colon-subtitle.) The first official poster design has hit the InterWebs and I’ve just got to say… I’m not impressed.

First of all, does it remind you of anything? It ought to, considering its obvious inspiration was well-nigh ubiquitous this summer:

Apparently, Abrams wanted to escape from established Star Trek lore so he could rip off Batman.

Okay, that’s not fair. A poster is just marketing, after all, and I’ve been following the movie biz long enough to know there’s often a huge disconnect between the marketing and the actual film, and the writers and directors rarely have anything to say about it. Perfect example: this year’s John Carter, a fun, swashbuckling fantasy of the old-school “planetary romance” variety and, in my opinion, the first adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs that came anywhere near to being faithful to the source material. (All those Tarzan flicks? Yeah, not much resemblance to the literary Tarzan, for the most part.) Carter should’ve been huge, in my opinion. But the movie was doomed from the start by a half-assed ad campaign that made the uninitiated think it was a turgid, deadly serious rip-off of Attack of the Clones, and also by the studio’s curious reluctance to accurately call it what it really was: John Carter of Mars. So I acknowledge that it’s far too early for me to write off Star Trek into Darkness as something I won’t like, and pretty reactionary to do so on the basis of one poster (not to mention the title, which, for the record, I also don’t like).

Nevertheless, I’m not seeing much in this poster that says “Star Trek” to me. Whatever happened to “the final frontier” and “strange new worlds” and “going boldly?” Where’s the wonder of the human adventure? What I see here is plainly Earth — specifically London, as you can see that weird Gherkin building in the skyline; apparently, it’s still standing in the 23rd century — and it’s dystopian and apocalyptic and, frankly, pretty damn pessimistic-looking. And that ain’t Star Trek. Not to me, anyhow. I don’t know what J.J. Abrams thinks Star Trek is supposed to be about, but I have yet to see much evidence that it’s what I — and generations of my fellow Trekkies — understand it to be about.

Fortunately, I’m getting better at compartmentalizing different aspects of the far-flung, decades-old media franchises that I’ve spent so much of my life’s energies obsessing over. I seem to have finally internalized the nasty truth: that as far as their corporate owners are concerned, these things are simply brands to be extended and diversified. And just as I don’t drink every product the Coca-Cola Company slaps its brand on, I’m not required to see, read, or buy everything that includes Star Trek in its name, either.

Nov282012

What Diabetes Is Like

I saw this pic of an “insulin cupcake” on Boing Boing a few days ago, and it’s kind of haunted me ever since:

I’m fortunate not to require insulin myself — I’ve got my case of the ‘betes pretty well controlled with only two pills a day, watching what I eat, and taking an afternoon walk — but my relationship with food has changed irrevocably since my diagnosis, and this picture is a good metaphor for the new paradigm. I am now extremely conscious of everything that goes in my mouth, and every decision I make about food requires a careful cost-benefit analysis. Hell, the mere fact that there is a decision to make is a major adjustment. It used to be somebody at work would offer me a donut or a cupcake, and I’d take it and enjoy it without the slightest worry. But nowadays my answer to “Would you like a… ?” has become an automatic “Yes, but…” I can no longer even look at desserts without feeling a twinge of dread. Rich chocolate cake has assumed an ominous air, pecan pie seems downright treacherous, and I just know the Oreos are plotting against me. And it’s not just sweets, either. I approach white-flour pasta with the same trepidation as pistols at dawn, potatoes may as well be radioactive these days, and I shy away from umbrella drinks as if they were made out of the same green-glowing sludge that transformed Jack Nicholson into the Joker.

In short, I don’t find a lot of comfort in my comfort foods any more. It’s not that I can’t eat the things I’ve always loved. I can, at least once in a while. But I can’t do it with joyful carelessness anymore. Now food is freighted with consequences. It always was, of course, which is why I’m in this mess to begin with, but now I’m aware of them in a way I didn’t have to be before. I am hyperaware of them, actually, as well as the knowledge that I’ll have to adjust something else later in the day to compensate for what I do now. For me, the pleasures of eating have been blunted by anxiety. And I fear that’s never going to change… ever. This is who I am now.

I hate it.

Nov242012

Quick Take: Cop Land

I missed James Mangold’s Cop Land when it was first released 15 years ago, but I recall being curious about it, because everyone was talking back then about Sylvester Stallone’s uncharacteristic performance. I finally managed to catch it this morning, and it turned out to be a good movie, if not quite an outstanding one. A story of corrupt New York cops and a small-town New Jersey sheriff who could’ve been one of them but for a chance act of heroism when he was a teenager, it suffers a bit from being somewhat familiar stuff. In fact, it reads like a second-tier Scorsese flick (the presence of Scorsese regulars Harvey Keitel, Robert DeNiro, and Ray Liotta, as well as the grittily realistic East Coast settings, no doubt contributes to that feeling) with a dollop of High Noon thrown in for good measure. But don’t misunderstand: It is well worth your time if you haven’t seen it, a solidly entertaining character study and cop thriller.

As for Stallone, well… all the buzz back in ’97 was completely deserved. I’ve never cared much for the man, to be honest, but this film is a genuine revelation. In Cop Land, he proves that he really can act (and no, I’ve never seen Rocky, which is usually offered up as a counterpoint when I say that). Here he plays a man who is pretty much the polar opposite of his usual on-screen persona. Instead of a swaggering, macho cartoon superhero, Freddie — the New Jersey sheriff — is a regular guy who’s been almost completely beaten down by disappointment and the feeling that he just wasn’t good enough to get what he wanted out of life. He’s overweight, wounded, tentative, complacent, the kind of man who takes a lot of shit and just smiles his way through it, even though something inside him twinges every single time one of his so-called friends cracks a joke at his expense or asks him to look the other way. He’s immensely likable and sympathetic in this part — we all know somebody like this, and I think many of us can identify with him, too. In the memorable words of DeNiro’s character, he’s a man waiting for something to do… and of course we all know that in the end he’s going to rise to the occasion and do it. What a shame this movie didn’t propel Stallone’s career onto another path as a true character actor, and that he’s instead had to pump himself up on steroids and just keep doing the same old schlock…

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